Dr. Avi Ashkenazi

Avraham Ashkenazi is an Associate Professor at the Gray Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences and Sagol School of Neuroscience at Tel Aviv University.

He obtained his PhD in Biomolecular Sciences from the Weizmann Institute in 2013. Then, he was a Research Associate at Cambridge University, UK, studying the biology of diseases that are caused by protein misfolding and aggregation, such as Huntington's disease, other rare tri-nucleotide repeat expansion diseases and Parkinson's disease.

Prof. Ashkenazi's goal is to delineate fundamental mechanisms of neuron survival affected in these devastating diseases, aiming to find new targets for diagnosis and therapy. His group combines stem-cell technology, animal models, biochemical and cellular approaches.

Prof. Ashkenazi's group was one of the first to develop and study patient-induced pluripotent-stem cells of the autonomic nervous system as a model to interrogate the molecular basis of neurodegeneration. In 2022, he received the Neurotoxin Exposure Treatment Parkinson's Program Early Investigator Research Award from the United State Department of Defense.